


The Sweltering Sea

by Vana



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Greyjoy Rebellion, M/M, asoiaf kinkmeme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-05
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-21 13:15:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/pseuds/Vana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tiny ficlet set on Stannis' ship during the Greyjoy Rebellion, written for the LJ kinkmeme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sweltering Sea

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt for this was: Davos/Stannis: During the Greyjoy Rebellion, Stannis is conflicted about his attraction to one of his men.

There’s an exhaustion about battle, a point where your hands don’t feel the ropes you tie, where your stomach won’t churn up and return to the sea any more wine and rich food out of sheer lack of energy. There’s a space between the fighting and the victory, the declaration and the reality, where you exist but don’t exist, a shadow of the child who never knew a war — a shadow of the boy who knew death at sea, far too early.

There’s a sudden mental wobble, a pair of kind brown eyes watching, _watching_ , across a heaving deck and as you call your orders the man obeys, not passively but with respect and agreement. He lifts capable hands to unwieldy sails and the sea is like a second body and you know him, he is Davos, Davos Seaworth — there was a ship, there will be another — but there’s no time now to remember the unknown future, there’s only the endless turn of the tiller and the roar of the waves.

Late at night you’ve gone over the charts so many times that routes and battles and currents trace themselves behind your eyes when you let them close, against the blue for water and red for bloodshed and black for the infinite march onwards. No rest, you know, for this is your duty and this will always be your duty and in the calm of midnight you see him — you saw him at your starving castle and you will see him at another — and his presence is peace and his eyes are heat and it’s more than respect, much more than gratitude you feel rising from the bottoms of your feet all the way up to your flushed cheeks, your feverish eyes. 

He looks at you — he served you then, he serves you now — and you turn your face to the gathering clouds, the first needles of rain cooling your burning skin. He says nothing; he just waits, and you close your eyes and you wait with him and night after night you wait — you know he’s there, he knows you are — and in the daytime it’s orders and confusion and all night it’s the hot ache of the anticipation and the duty and the homeward journey after the bloody victory. At dawn each day you are spent, wrung out with waiting for him and dreaming of him — you dream of him more than you dream of home. When you emerge from your cabin, you see him, and he watches, and you wonder.


End file.
